Several years have passed since the case of the Martian Memorandum. Tex Murphy is again on the rocks, spending his days drinking and smoking, desperately looking for clients. Then his old mentor, the Colonel, pays him a visit, telling him of a big case he's on. He's not offering crumbs to Tex, he just wants him to know, that he bears no ill feelings towards him anymore, as this is to be his final case before retirement.
The visit sparks something in Tex, making him want to jump back on the horse, but as luck has it, his fax machine is broken, so he needs a new one. But there's a case closer as well, as someone has broken into Rooks Pawn Shop. While trying to score a new fax machine, a burglary is good enough to wet Tex's whistle for sleuthing again.
Tex manages to solve the case and gets a new fax machine as well. A message arrives, teasing a case, so he meets a mysterious woman, who asks him to find a stolen bird statue. As the money is good, Tex does just that, only to find out that he's been double-crossed by a mysterious organization, the same one the Colonel was investigating. As Tex goes to see his old colleague, it becomes apparent, that the old man has bitten more than he could chew, as a killer known as Chameleon, a shapeshifter, has plummeted a dagger to his chest.
After having taken the Colonel to a hospital, Text learns of an ancient racial purity-seeking cult, that intends to use satellites to spread a deadly virus on Earth to get rid of the riff-raff. They would hide on a space station, waiting as long as necessary for the virus to then clear off Earth's atmosphere before returning back to the human-free, clean world.
While there had been only three years in between Martian Memorandum and Under A Killing Moon, a lot had changed. Technically speaking, Under A Killing Moon is from a different planet in comparison to its more traditional point-and-click predecessor. Not only does the game boast of being an interactive movie, but the way the game is presented is also something completely different: the world is now explorable in real time, 1st person 3D. Instead of hunting hotspots, you now need to really explore the environments to find the clues you need.
Under A Killing Moon wasn't the first game to use FMV, it was, however, one of the few games that managed to get the use of FMV right: It's used to deliver the narrative and show some actions within the game itself, but most of the things Tex does don't launch unnecessary FMV segments. In a word, Chris Jones understood that it was a game after all, not an excuse to string out unnecessary video clips. (cough-sierra-cough).
The game world is explored in two modes, of which the first is the real-time 1st person exploration mode. The second is the interaction model, in which you can open doors, use items, pick things up, and so on, all the standard adventure game things. It actually works surprisingly well, albeit the movement is at times a bit tricky, especially on modern machines, which can make the game run a bit too quickly. This makes missing items on the exploration mode a bit too easy, as you actually move around by using the mouse and look up and down with the cursor keys. It's not the most intuitive way of moving, especially after having been accustomed to modern 1st person movement in games.
At times, it's obvious that the developers were a bit too happy with the possibility of being able to hide things in 3d environments. In some locations, you need to constantly duck under the tables and check out and under objects to find all you need. While the puzzles aren't hard as such, those kinds of hidden object bits make the game a bit frustrating at times, as the interactable objects get easily lost in the scenes thanks to the low fidelity of the graphics. These bits aren't even helped by the interactive help menu, as while it does indicate what you are missing, it is still easy to spend far too much time looking for an elusive item you need.
Then there are the many discussion bits, during which you need to do just that, talk to people to get more info so you can continue the case. The discussions are mostly pretty well written and acted and the system has improved quite a bit from the previous games. The acting is actually surprisingly good, overall, there are even a couple of familiar names among the cast. James Earl Jones has a bit role as a narrator and Margot Kidder has a role as a cranky bartender.
Under A Killing Moon is, all in all, a huge improvement over the previous games. It has a much clearer focus and the puzzles have been thought out far better. It can as a kind of a soft reboot of the series. While it acknowledges the previous games, it's also more of its own thing, turning a series that was previously poorly designed adventure games into something that is far more enjoyable as a game and as a bit comedic b-movie.
Even with the small flaws, this is the first actually good game in the Tex Murphy series. It also provided a blueprint for how the following games would be presented. The style invented here has followed the gumshoe out of time from here, even the most recent entry to the series, the Kickstarted Tesla Effect, used a similar format. The upcoming remastering of The Pandora Directive, the game that is often thought of as the best in the series, will do the same, only with upscaled FMV scenes and rebuilt higher fidelity real-time environments.
If you haven't played the previous Tex Murphy games, Under a Killing Moon is a good point to jump in. While things from the previous games are dropped here and there, you don't need any specific knowledge of them. You can play the game as is and it will be enjoyable enough of a ride. You can buy the game from GOG and Steam.
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